Guards stand next to the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives in Washington in 2003. / Ron Edmonds/Associated Press

Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor

It’s an odd start to the Independence Day holiday — we’re celebrating our national identity, an assertion of the rights of individuals to self-govern, yet at the same time, many fear that our courts, our culture and our Congress are privileging corporations over everyone else.

The colonists who made liberty (at least for some) the central tenet of their revolution 238 years ago might not be stunned that we’re still grappling with that concept today, but I suspect they would be puzzled by the dimensions and tenor of the modern debate.

Sure, theDeclaration of Independence’s authors made bold statements about freedom, while helping to create a republic that countenanced horrific inequalities and the most barbarous social concept on the planet, slavery.

But they were conscious enough to have raged in argument over it, and enough of them understood that the new country’s success would ultimately hinge on a recognition of universal liberty. (See Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Rufus King, for reference.)

A war and a hundred more years of activism and legislation finally leveled the Constitution’s playing field, and established that the inalienable rights invoked in the Declaration apply (in law, if not always in practice) without exceptions based on gender, race or religion.

But the arguments we’re having as we celebrate the anniversary of our independence have more to do with whose rights mean the most. Is it individuals, whose interests were certainly top-of-mind when the founders wrote the Declaration and later forged the Constitution?

Or is it corporations, who have seen their own interests increasingly equated with those of individuals?

The end of the U.S. Supreme Court term this week inspired another row over the boundaries between corporate and individual interests, with individuals taking it on the chin for what seems like the umpteenth time in recent years. The justices said the Religious Freedom Restoration Act must be interpreted to shield some corporations from providing health plans that include birth control — a requirement of the federal Affordable Care Act — to preserve the corporate owners’ religious freedom.

Is this really what liberty means? That’s not really a Yankee Doodle kind of idea, is it? Doesn’t exactly make me want to sing “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

I certainly don’t mean to make light of the idea of individual rights accruing to corporate interests. It’s coming up a lot at the Supreme Court — with reference to campaign finance laws, where corporate money is seen as indistinct now from an individual’s money, and in cases like Hobby Lobby’s, the craft store that produced the corporate religious freedom ruling this week.

It’s becoming one of the central constitutional battlegrounds, and that’s happening on purpose, as mostly conservative interests continue to push the notion that corporations are indistinct from people, as far as rights are concerned.

My instinct, of course, is to say that’s absurd. Corporations are just aggregations of capital. And money is property, which is highly protected under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, but also highly regulable under provisions such as Article I, Section 8, which gives Congress the right to excise money in the form of taxes.

How can a corporation have rights like a person?

But University of Michigan constitutional law professor Richard Primus — a former clerk for liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — caught me short on that argument.

“So, do you think the Free Press has free speech rights?” he asked. “Of course you do. And you should. The fact that the Free Press is a corporation doesn’t contradict with the idea that you’re expressing ideas that are protected by the First Amendment. And government regulation of your ability to buy the things that you need to publish would be abridging your rights as clearly as restraining what you say in the publication.”

The problem, Primus points out, is the balancing of those corporate rights against individuals.

“The corporate form allows people to scale their activities, so now you’re not just exercising your own rights, but doing things that affect other people’s rights as well,” he said. “The Constitution is supposed to protect the rights of people who are dissenters, unpopular or weak from more powerful majorities or interests. Over time, there’s a doctrinal tendency to actually protect the people who have power in the first place. And that’s how you might describe the court’s current trend.”

In the Hobby Lobby case, for instance, the court protected corporate owners’ rights not to be complicit in activity they find religiously objectionable. But it ignored the rights of employees — a comparatively weak constituency — to use their compensation (yes, health care is compensation) in a way that was free from someone else’s religious beliefs.

When the court sides with corporations’ speech interests in campaign finance cases, it’s failing to balance the rights of individuals who have the same free speech rights (and whose ideas may deserve equal footing in the marketplace) but who can’t buy as many ads.

I doubt it’s supposed to work that way. But I’m also unsure that the authors of the Declaration would recognize this debate if they were witness to it.

The concept of liberty has evolved over time, and so have the arguments we’ve having.

The charm of America is that the debate continues. The challenge is, as always, to fulfill the expression of self-evident truths that started it all in 1776.